CFP: Literature and Propaganda (grad) (6/9/06; 9/22/06-9/23/06)

full name / name of organization:

Jessica Langston

contact email:

jlangston24@yahoo.ca

Second Annual University of Ottawa English GraduateConferencePropaganda and its Discontents

Power, according to Michel Foucault, is productive,simultaneously producing and produced by discourse.This may, in fact, be one way of understandingpropaganda: a discursive promotion of the interestsand agenda of an overarching or specific power regime.If, as Foucault and many other theorists argue, poweralways already resides in every discourse vialanguage, can propaganda only be seen as a site ofexpressive power? Or is there room for a propaganda ofresistance? From the state propaganda of Virgil’swritings to the pamphleteers of the Puritan Revolutionto the Soviet cultural project to the current ‘War onTerror,’ propaganda has long been an important motiveand motivator in the production of cultural texts.Likewise, culture has been equally integral to thedissemination of propaganda. We would like to considertexts (film, music, art, literature) as propagandaboth for and against political, religious and socialpower. How is power expressed in these texts? How doesresistance make itself heard? How do we re-read,recuperate and revise the propaganda of previoushistorical periods? Is there an outside of propaganda?How do we evaluate propaganda – through causes,motives, and effects, or is it possible to examinethese texts as autonomous aesthetic artifacts?